The Mirror Verses
by Spockchick
Summary: Mirror Universe. Each crewmember tells their story. A brief tale of the resilience of the human spirit, love, friendship and forgiveness. Based on poetry. Scotty/Gaila/Chapel; Sulu/Chekov, Spock, T'Pring/McCoy, Uhura/Kyle.
1. Parts 1 to 5

**The Mirror Verses**

**Disclaimer: **I own nothing, I just watch these characters (owned by Paramount) and write down what they do.  
**Beta:** The wonderful, patient, SpockLikesCats. I fiddle-faddle after, therefore mistakes are my own.  
**Warnings:** Abuse, murder, torture, major character deaths, truly evil Spock.  
**Summary:** Experimental Mirror 'verse mini-story based on poetry, with some Shakespeare and The Bible too. Dark, but a tribute to the spirit, friendship, love and the resilience of the human body. Gentle reader, I beg do not judge this tale until the end, if you are kind enough to read that far. All poems are out-of-copyright and in the public domain.

* * *

**1. Spock: Babel**

On a desert planet, water is precious. Evolved to conserve fluid, his species' bodies are miserly with water. Their pores do not sweat, their intestines suck moisture from food, their urine is concentrated.

And tears do not flow from their eyes.

...

Living among humans the continual process of shielding taxes him. Each waking moment affords only constant mental assault experienced in Babel. Continual chatter emanates from their thin, weak skulls; a stream of emotional incontinence that swells to a river. Here, peace does not rule. Despite the outward military discipline, within the crew lives a writhing nest of untamed thoughts, from mundane to profound, and the discipline of his mental practice is barely enough to keep the cacophony at bay.

On occasion, he has cause to touch them, most often to extract information hidden deep inside their soft cortical matter. He must make contact to identify the owner of a thought. Rubbery skin presses cold and clammy to his dry fingertips. A fastidious man, Spock feels in such circumstances the urge to wipe his hand on the black fabric covering his thigh, all the while willing his diaphragm to stay level. A show of physical revulsion would be weak.

And the smell …they reek, of sweat, of decaying flesh, of bodily fluids and of pheromones. On rare women he detects the nauseating iron tang of dead menstrual blood, when those who wish to escape the ship by means of pregnancy neglect their ovulation suppressants. In each case, that decision leads to swift transport into space where the fragile tubes holding live blood rupture, their boiling contents spewing into cavities and voids within their feeble bodies. It is a beautiful death; he imagines the blood spreading, ink in water, until all is uniform red.

These beings begin to die the minute they are born. In his vivid mind he views cellular degeneration with microscopic precision each time he smells it.

Their sweet necrosis catches in his nostrils, and all their tears cannot wash out a trace of it.

...

But helpless pieces in the game He plays  
Upon this chequer-board of Nights and Days  
He hither and thither moves, and checks ... and slays,  
Then one by one, back in the Closet lays.  
The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,  
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit,  
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,  
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

"The Rubáiyát," Omar Khayyám (1048–1131),

_Translated by Edward Fitzgerald in 1859._

* * *

**2. Spock: As if alive**

Measured by the yardstick of the sexual intemperance of his crew, he is a monk. When he was green in his role as Captain – he allows an indulgent amount of amusement at the pun – they sent him a human woman, and he was young and curious.

The experiment is useful; he requires a control for comparison with his occasional use of T'Pring. He knows she has other lovers, but it is of no consequence; her beauty is unmatched, and she despises him enough to give their encounters the exhilarating quality of a combat to the death.

'Tis pity she's a whore.

The girl is confident, not one of the late Kirk's cast-offs but someone new, perhaps procured planet-side during a recent raid. Her eyes roam in approval about the captain's quarters and she stalks to the array of weapons on the wall, raising a hand to caress the smooth, ebony handle of a glittering blade, thumbing the rounded end.

Tight leggings encase strong legs, two wide leather straps pass over her breasts and a platinum braid falls over her shoulder blades. He asks her to undress.

Pale, thin skin covers the mechanism of her body and blue veins stand out on white breasts, whose too-pink nipples appear as sores. In horror, he sees she is without body hair; depilated, child-like and foetal. Anger drives him onwards; he tries to think only of himself, but her limbs become sweat-slicked and sickening. Combined with her lower body temperature, the sensations conspire to cause a repellent, psychotic hallucination. The slimy, hairless creature he penetrates becomes a foul gastropod, _Deroceras Reticulatum_. He disengages, and barely makes it to the head, where acrid bile bubbles up, scours his throat and splashes into the steel bowl.

On his return, she is still in his bed, smiling a concerned smile. It is her last.

The medical team can grow synthetic organs, but donor organs do not drain the ship's budget, and this species is so very prone to bodily failure. Resurrection of the fallen is more efficient than re-training a new drudge to his exacting standards, and it has an advantageous side effect; the pathetic loyalty of a serf clutching at a life thought lost.

Under the guise of caressing her cheek, although it causes his stomach to heave anew, he grasps her face and neck. Her blows rain down upon his shoulders; he thinks it an apt phrase, for they have no more effect on him than a soft drizzle. Soon it is over and he asks his guards to place her mindless body in stasis, marked 'human: organ bank'.

There she stands, blank-eyed behind frosty glass, looking as if she were alive.

...

Oh sir, she smiled, no doubt  
Whene'er I passed her; but who passed without  
Much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands;  
Then all smiles stopped together. There she stands  
As if alive.

"My Last Duchess," Robert Browning (1812-1899)

* * *

**3. T'Pring: The partisan's tale**

When she steps into the cell, she mistakes the dark stain behind the boy for his shadow.

It is not.

She knows the boot-print in the blood.

"Camera off." The instruction is common here; many activities are too repellent to record. He sits immobile and bowed, cross-legged on the deck, hands bound behind his back. He is so thin; the hard surface must feel agonising. Without his uniform shirt, each bump of his spinal column stands out in cadaverous relief, his body is a leaching hulled fruit; decaying but not quite dead.

One knee to the deck, she sinks down to his eye level and his head tips up on puppet strings, eyes as blank as any marionette's. How could she be so naïve about his pain? He feels nothing; no hard deck beneath the bones of his pelvis, no burn of cuffs on his wrists, no breeze of air as she whispers close to his face.

"I'm sorry, I'm so sorry."

In return he offers a tiny nod, but has a thousand-parsec stare. With the lightest touch, she holds his face in her hands – the sharp stubble is incompatible with his youth – covers his lips with hers, prises them open and pushes her tongue inside, tasting salt, iron and the sweet acetone tang of starvation. She probes between his bottom teeth and cheek, pushing away Oedipal thoughts, then withdraws.

_Let me be merciful as well as just._

Her thumb strokes his jaw then presses down and she feels a yielding pop as the capsule's casing breaks to release its toxic contents through the thin mucous membrane of his mouth.

"Just like the salt-burst of caviar, _Milyi_. You will not feel pain, I promise." She wraps her arms around his soon-to-be remains, burying her grief in the crook of his neck. He sinks, diminished, within her grasp, a cue to lower his bird-frame to the floor, cradling his head at her breast. A threadbare cover from the hard, narrow bunk serves as his shroud, and it takes all her training and discipline to rise from the deck and leave him, cold and alone. For a respectful moment she stands at attention, her hot skull is inflating and feels as though it might spray its ripe contents over this fatal scene. "I am sorry, _Milyi_, I was unable to take your pain until now, _vas_. He hath stolen away the brightest jewel of our crown today."

Stooping, she reaches below the stiff mattress and yanks out a heavy metal strut. Over and over she twists and bends the steel in her rage, until it is too hot to touch. They will think she used it to beat him.

One day, this Vulcan will release her sorrow.

At the threshold of the brig, she reports to the guard: "Our traitor is dead. I have alerted Medical. Two orderlies will remove it to ascertain if its organs can be used."

...

Let us be merciful as well as just;  
This passing traveller, who hath stolen away  
The brightest jewel of my crown to-day,  
Shall of himself the precious gem restore;  
By giving it, I make it mine once more.  
Over those fatal footprints I will throw  
My ermine mantle like another snow

"The Student's Tale," Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882)

Milyi: Russian for 'pretty one'

_vas_: Vulcan for 'relief', thank you VLD

* * *

**4. T'Pring: The face of all the world is changed / 1C 13:4**

A rib, a dip, a hip, a thigh, the crook of a knee. Such is the landscape of my love, move still, oh still beside me.

His love is patient, his love is kind. It does not boast, it has no envy, it is not arrogant. At night, when we are sleepless, he strokes my skin and calls me 'warrior.' Never has he asked after my other lover, accepting it as a necessary, occasional horror required to maintain our subterfuge. His love is tidal, flowing over to soothe, ebbing when I sink beneath suffocating human emotion. Tonight my mind is flayed and rubbed with salt. I have abandoned my fallen comrade on the deck, caused the faraway light in his eyes to gutter, and die.

As we lie entwined, I know he fears for my sanity, worries over my constant meditation, but only I can stop the spoiled psyche of a mind turned putrid.

Eight thousand, seven hundred and thirty-six. These are the hours I have spent in practice. One firepot, one flame, one focus. I cannot move a mountain, but I must move a man.

...

The face of all the world is changed, I think,  
Since first I heard the footsteps of thy soul  
Move still, oh, still, beside me, as they stole  
Betwixt me and the dreadful outer brink  
Of obvious death, where I, who thought to sink,  
caught up into love,  
And taught the whole of life in a new rhythm.

"Sonnets from the Portuguese, VII," Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806 -1861)

* * *

**5. Chapel: It is this sorrow of separation that gazes in silence**

So many here in stasis, too many: the dead, the damaged and the despoiled. Sapphire eyes stare through a film of frost as I tend the girl's glass coffin with covert care, each day aware those eyes could be my own.

Once I was young, naive and affected by the allure of power, strength and virility. Years ago, Spock was out of his mind with some Vulcan fire only female flesh could quench; I offered myself along with a bowl of soup.

He threw me and it against a bulkhead.

I rub the muscle over my hip. Even McCoy wasn't able to fix it, not completely, and the cold surrounding the stasis-chambers makes it twinge.

The Vulcan was not always our captain, and he was not always this way. A mission went awry and almost all the crew, even Vulcans, were affected by alien spores, turning us passive. Ideal Empire fodder one would think, but we became intractable too, and the only way to snap us out of it was to induce an extreme emotional response. Spock, provoked by Kirk into violence, killed his captain, and his love. Along with Kirk's life, Spock's human half flowed away like blood through a wound and, never wanting command, his self-inflicted position pushed him over the precipice. His emotions, directed inward, could not be contained. The shrapnel of his guilt and rage exploded though the ship, lacerating all our minds.

_Two years back? It feels as twenty._

Time is distorted here; strain ages us at an accelerated rate, while days pass in a glacial cycle of oppression, overthrow, appropriation and destruction. All members of the cloaked resistance are in fear of revelation, of torture more than anything. The unbroken, on the brink of the welcoming arms of death, are placed in stasis and repaired by the nanos, just so he can begin the sequence of torment anew. Husks are re-hydrated so he can drain their life-fluid once more . When they gather their wits enough to know the truth, most go mad.

_Exit through the first airlock on the left. Do not pause to collect a spacesuit._

Years of biological training enable me to see clearly within them, not in the psychological sense, but through the crust to the anatomical workings, past the dermis, epidermis and subcutaneous layers, to the kidneys and adrenal glands. In normal operation, human adrenal glands secrete thirty-five to forty milligrams of cortisol per day.

A moderate level of stress hormone is normal and motivating; it assists with decision making, alerts us. In my work, I see levels eight times normal. With my medical eye, I can spot a female resistance member by her shape. There is the soft pouch of stubborn cortisol-induced fat carried over the abdomen of a woman otherwise lithe of limb, and something in her walk that says 'keep your distance'. In order to keep together, we must stay steadfast and alone, connected only by the pang of separation. That final subtlety is lost on those who live by logic.

McCoy will not allow me within spitting distance of Chekov's stasis unit, or rather the unit that holds the collection of tissue and bone that once was Chekov. By the movements of his eyes alone, the doctor signals his treatment of the container as a casket, a shrine, a temple, within it a celestial divinity.

At ship's night, I sit among these static beings and pray my futile little prayers.

...

It is the pang of separation that spreads throughout the world  
and gives birth to shapes innumerable in the infinite sky.  
It is this sorrow of separation that gazes in silence  
all night, from star to star.

"The Pang of Separation," Rabindranath Tagore (1861 – 1941)

* * *

Coming next: Sulu, McCoy, Kyle and Uhura


	2. Parts 6 to 10

**6. Sulu: The trick is to keep breathing**

One small flame partnered by one tall stick of incense, its smoke spiralling to the overhead in a cabin warm with the scent of plum-blossom.  
In the wink of an eye he watched the puppy grow into a beaten, dull-eyed dog, and he is confused by how time could appear so static when the evidence of its passing, until recently, stood before him.

_Since an arrow in flight is not seen to move during any single instant, it cannot possibly be moving at all._

_An unstable particle, if observed continually, will never decay._

Chapel's vigil is not his way. To observe continually is to give up hope, hope that those bodies will ever be at rest and made dust. At night he dreams of the undead wandering the halls, and a Russian boy's sweet face, grey and inanimate. As long as their organs remain viable, after their brains are long extinguished, some small part of them is alive. Can they pass into their next state of being?

Once, he knew nothing of his ancestors' teachings, but death as a constant companion manhandles him towards their philosophies. His physicist's rationality rails against it, but when he has looked for answers everywhere, there is only this one stone left to peer beneath.

Concentrating on the flame, his mind long beyond emptying, he begins his habitual meditation and computation, his only means of separation from his existence.

Breathe in; his nostrils are filled with sweet, heavy floral notes and he steps outside his body to observe. From a distance of a meter, ten to the zero, he watches a slim, dark-haired man cross-legged on a bamboo mat.

Breathe out; ten to the one, ten meters away, a ship's quarters, sparse, tidy, shoes at the door, freighted with absence.

Breathe in; ten to the three, one kilometre away, a ship, its hard shell the only protection from the vacuum of space, both lifeboat and prison.

Breathe out; ten to the four; ten kilometres away, the ship is an ellipse in dark space, surrounded by stars.

Breathe in; ten to the seven, ten thousand kilometres away, a green planet.

Breathe out; ten to the thirteen; ten million kilometres away, a solar system comes into view.

Breathe in; ten to the twenty-one, at one-hundred thousand light years now, a galaxy.

Breathe out; ten to the twenty-two; from a distance of one million light years, collections of galaxies swirl like starlings.

Breathe in; ten to the twenty-four, one hundred million light years, the galaxies are points of light.

...

It will be nothing to the universe if he doesn't keep breathing.

But he will.

...

To what shall  
I liken the world?  
Moonlight, reflected  
In dewdrops  
Shaken from a crane's bill.

"Impermanence," Eithei Dogen, (1200 – 1253)

Title taken from the novel of the same name, a book of madness and loss, by Janice Galloway.

* * *

**7. McCoy: The word well-weighed, the practised smile**

He holds so many thin and brittle secrets in his hands, one single slip could shatter them.

Three hundred and eighty-one living souls remain of the original four hundred and thirty crew. Fifteen lie dormant in an icy crypt, waiting for their gradual embalming. Orderlies will remove their organs in increments until the bodies are mummified. Instead of a burial within a shining limestone-clad pyramid, he will consign those bodies to the disintegrator, and Sulu will recycle their ash to fertilise the arboretum. Five so far are spread upon its ground.

Seventeen crew exited through the airlocks, jettisoned or jumped, and an even dozen evaporated in light. In manoeuvres favoured by dictatorships, they were present one moment, then gone, and the terror of not knowing their fate tears at their friends and family, until the rending grief is audible.  
Except the doctor does know.

In the Captain's quarters a device is set into the wall, a trophy procured in a raiding party to the Tantalus colony. Nobody knows how it works – the technology is alien to them – and T'Pring's most covert examinations, reported to Scotty, revealed nothing.

By observation and deduction, McCoy has come to believe Spock has fathomed the workings of the machine. Kirk never used it, and after his death the new captain operated it on twelve occasions, time increasing between each use until all use stopped. T'Pring's hours of practice in shielding her thoughts from Spock mean she is unable to enter his, and so the doctor's suspicions remain unconfirmed, that their captain is afraid of the device.

First Officer T'Pring: how can he describe her? Boudiccan warrior, mistress of moral duplicity, leader, lover and friend. On the rare nights he is able to visit her, due to a fortunate combination of clear corridors and synchronised shifts, all his descriptions are inadequate. These nights are reduced to bare emotion and action, desperate, exquisite, fierce and furious.

Only he and she know what they have done, and if they are caught, the consequences will be severe. His inability to block out his terror at the thought of her death shames him; she has troubles enough. Discovery by Spock is unlikely as the captain has never visited his first officer's quarters.

The Vulcan summons, he does not seek.

...

Life has dark secrets; and the hearts are few  
That treasure not some sorrow from the world-  
A sorrow silent, gloomy, and unknown,  
Yet colouring the future from the past.  
We see the eye subdued, the practised smile,  
The word well weighed before it pass the lip,  
And know not of the misery within:  
Yet there it works incessantly, and fears  
The time to come; for time is terrible,  
Avenging, and betraying.

"Secrets," Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802 - 1838)

* * *

**8. Kyle: We carry our hearts**

This is a twisted parody of some historic world, where bladed weapons, no more evolved than in the Bronze Age, are scabbarded in leather boots. Communications are conveyed on pressed wood-pulp scratched with points of graphite. This tyranny has pushed us back in time, turned us into Luddites wary of technology, and with good reason.

Each push of a button, or request for information echoes as a shout throughout the decks, so the parchments and papyri of our ancient worlds serve us now, immolated in flames masquerading as aids to meditation. They are letters from the front, sent only to one's own platoon, each one of us dreaming of a time when we will lie in green meadows with our love, reaching for drifting dragonflies.

Within the folds of our uniforms, we carry our hearts. What loathsome mind constructed our control? The Agonizer is inelegant, stubby-winged and bulbous, but its efficiency lies in specificity. The evil scarab knows only its owner and, pressed against another's ribs, lies dormant. The smallest transgression causes a punishment swift and ravaging, and with each chastisement, the resistance grows ever stronger. Fractured groups assemble in dark alcoves, passing time until they can go over the top.

We sit together on the fire-step, Scotty and I, awaiting our moment to rise, about-face and meet the fusillade. While we plan our advance in murmurs, there is a magnesium flash –

...

The flowers left thick at nightfall in the wood  
This Eastertide call into mind the men,  
Now far from home, who, with their sweethearts, should  
Have gathered them and will do never again.

"In Memoriam," Edward Thomas (1878-1917)

*Fire-step: a wooden box in WW1 trenches that allows a gunner to step-up and fire over the trench

* * *

**9. Uhura: Containment**

Most mornings she wakes from fitful sleep, and for some seconds, forgets. Somehow, her body knows before her mind, clenching her gut and speeding up her heart rate. Then she remembers; _John Winston Kyle is gone. My husband is gone._

During work hours, she thinks _I must tell John about that, _then catches herself. In the evening, she looks up to say something to him, seated at his desk, a copper curl dangling over his forehead, but the chair is empty. For weeks, in stubborn denial, she sets out two teacups. When will this half-life end? A life where you reach for part of you – _partner_, she likes that word better now – only to stumble into the blackest void, falling and full of shame that for one snap of time, you let reality recede.

Who will mock her anger now, and make it seem funny? Who will tell her worrying is pointless? Who will recite Keats in the velvet hour of ship's night? Who will read her reports and tell her where her rage and despair are bleeding through? Who will be her ballast? Who will love her as much as he?

She knows she is fire, but he was not her ice.

He was her containment and her hearth, and it has grown so cold, with embers died to ash.

...

No one so much as you  
Loves this my clay,  
Or would lament as you  
Its dying day.  
You know me through and through  
Though I have not told,  
And though with what you know  
You are not bold.  
None ever was so fair  
As I thought you:  
Not a word can I bear  
Spoken against you.

"No-one So Much as You," Edward Thomas (1878-1917)

* * *

**10. Gaila: Lest my ornaments prove too dangerous**

Standard has a cadence unlike Orion. For her, its pitch, rise and rhythms are tricky, but she had a good language teacher who used to say, 'Stop concentrating on the words and their meanings, just feel the tempo.' In class, they sang nonsense poems, to develop confidence and help their tongues twist around the words. At night those words, persistent worms embedded in her brain, burrow at the verges of her memory. At first their frequencies are far away, then come into focus as the debris of the day drifts away.

Beside her, cold from her nightly pilgrimage, lies Christine with her cheek soft against Gaila's breast and a tremor running through her. Gaila massages the nurse's bad hip, willing her to sleep. Since Chekov's death, some of the fight has gone out of Christine, as though the onion-skin layers of her resolve are peeling away. Gaila is dismayed; all she wants to do is pound the Vulcan's face into the deck plating until it shines wet and dark as emeralds, while gripping his most precious parts in the jaws of one of Scotty's bench-vices.

Visions of brutal revenge entertain her; the crack of bone or the slither and slop of intestines spilling from an abdominal slit. They allow her to put one foot in front of the other and yes, she is aware of how violence is never the answer, except sometimes it is.

_I'll prove the prettier fellow of the two, and wear my dagger with the braver grace.¹_

Gaila sings a quiet tune to one of the nonsense poems, hoping her impromptu lullaby will cause sleep to claim Christine after so many weeks of wandering the passageways, a pale spectre with space-white skin, on her fretful night watch.

A few verses in and Christine is asleep, in a coma of exhaustion. At last her brain has taken the decision her body can't and instigated a full systems shutdown. Even in repose, tiny lines form between her eyebrows, but the eyes behind her blue-veined lids, mercifully, are still. Gaila, stiff as a sentry, fears any movement will wake her companion. She will look after Christine until she can't, for she must keep busy. It is essential to nurture her hope, to feel the rage, and the living skin beneath her hands.

She is surprised to hear the crack in her voice as the song's words turn to a lament in her mouth. She is surprised to taste her own tears as they trickle down her face and between her lips. She is surprised, after all this time, by the question that forces its way into her mind.

If I sink beneath, who will pull me out?

...

They went to sea in a Sieve, they did,  
In a Sieve they went to sea:  
In spite of all their friends could say,  
On a winter's morn, on a stormy day,  
In a Sieve they went to sea!  
And when the Sieve turned round and round,  
And every one cried, 'You'll all be drowned!'  
They called aloud, 'Our Sieve aren't big,  
But we don't care a button! we don't care a fig!  
In a Sieve we'll go to sea!'

Far and few, far and few,  
Are the lands where the Jumblies live;  
Their heads are green, and their hands are blue,  
And they went to sea in a Sieve.

"The Jumblies," Edward Lear (1812-1888)

¹Portia, _The Merchant of Venice_, William Shakespeare (1564-1616)

* * *

Next: Uhura, Scotty, Chapel


	3. Parts 11 to 15

**11. Uhura: Colubrine**

Scotty was with him when he vanished, not her, and she is ashamed at the jealousy she feels over this. She sleeps in his clothing, but none holds his scent, such is the efficiency of the refreshers. For one sweat-soaked shirt, she would pay a queen's ransom.

Ancient Kenyans believed a dead man's spirit inhabited a snake until it could pass over. After all the years she has explored in space, their beliefs no longer seem fantastic. The crew has seen consciousness in a cloud, beings made of light, and one man's mind in another man's body.

She fingers her talisman, a gold serpent coiled around her arm, given by her mother for a trousseau. The action has long crossed the border from comfort to compulsion but stroking its scales helps to recall memories. Enough. She has wallowed in them too long and retrospection will not bring justice, or return him.

She forces a sleuth's stiletto into a lock. The shallow drawer beneath his desk springs open and a snooper's fear of discovery gusts over her, but the ease of her break-in means he wanted her to play the thief. She lifts out a stout leather-bound laboratory notebook, a heavy, incongruous tome tooled in gold with thick rag-paper pages.

It is scribbled with genetic diagrams of strange matings, and notes on phenotypes and genotypes in Kyle's large, untidy hand. Notes in Sulu's precise script are crammed into the margins.

The last dozen sheets are carved out in the centre to form a thick border, and when she exposes it, her eyes scan the words across the base several times, to make sure she understands.

_'Nameless Grace'_

_For Nyota, who walks in beauty like the night._

Pressed into the frame, above this introduction, is a midnight-blue plant; desiccated, but plush and pure in colour.

He made her a rose.

...

When you bathe, sprinkle perfume, and weave your hair in braids,  
string jasmine for the counterpane.  
Wear your clothes like a bride, anklets for your feet, bracelets for your arms.  
Don't forget rosewater, don't forget henna for the palms of your hands.

"Poem to Her Daughter," Mwana Kupona binti Msham (1790-1860).

_Translated from the Swahili by J.W. Allen_

* * *

**12. Scotty: ****Insomnia**

Gritty-eyed, slumped in a chair on an engineering night watch, he visualises the crew as dots marking the intersections of a grid drawn on a board at the end of a hard-surfaced lecture theatre. Paranoia and anxiety radiate in concentric waves, emanating from regular epicentres. Where four circles touch, voids remain as diamonds with bowed, concave sides. There is no mathematical name for these elegant, four-pointed stars, but he can calculate their area as easily as falling off a warp engine.

1 – π/4

One minus pi over four, or twenty percent of the whole. It's not twenty percent of course, more like 21.5 if you use pi to two decimal places, or 21.46 if you use it to six. On human subjects, this is spurious accuracy, not statistics but conjecture, and what is point four-six of a person anyway? Scotty thinks he knows the answer to that question, but doesn't like to dwell on how he knows, not here, alone in the dark. The loose interpretation of the result of his subtraction and division offers him a tiny chink of perverse joy, as such sloppiness would irritate the captain.

Subtract and divide. The Vulcan does that too.

It sounds like the first line of a bad joke; if eighty per cent of the crew are nervous, what are the remaining twenty percent?

_Opportunistic_.

On a lawless ship, underground economies flourish and crew employ private henchmen, so-called security 'on commission'. Hence the resistance's nickname for a good guy, an NCO, a Non-Commissioned Officer.

...

This state of watchfulness doesn't allow for true sleep, only a paddle in the shallows while his imaginings turn to vivid dreams. His shiny Starfleet teaching-space morphs into a steep, oak-panelled nineteenth century auditorium with him up front, a long maple pointer in his hand. When he turns to his students the collar of his Harris Tweed jacket abrades his neck and he slides a hand beneath to scratch, wondering why cloth woven mostly on the island of Lewis, is named after Harris.

There are no students; no, correct that, there is one student. Gaila sits bright and straight on a hard wooden bench, her visible parts covered by a red cotton dress, crossed and pleated tight over her breasts. Before he can address her, his attention is brought back to the board by a low _thunk_. On an old chalkboard, the circles of paranoia remain, but the star-like squares between are filling up with mercurial, molten metal that hardens and slides down, until the heavy points pierce the teak parquet. The stars fill, firm, and fall in rows; some hit wood, some hit each other until a rhythm, regular but discordant, is established. After the last note dies, he bends and picks up two pocketfuls of stars that remind him of Japanese _hira shuriken_.

When he turns about, he is worried Gaila will be gone, but she isn't and he empties his pockets, presenting the honed throwing stars for her approval. After running a red nail about the edges, she gives a satisfied nod. He bows a fraction, approximately twenty degrees.

They have an understanding.

...

His final vision before he jerks awake is of Gaila, in a passageway full of smoke and flickering lights with her foot triumphant on a slain beast. It is an alien reptile resembling a miniature stegosaurus. For a second, in the ill-lit, strobed fog, he sees the felled creature as a man, foetally curled with a line of _hira shuriken _embedded deep in his spine, and his uniform dripping green. In a blink, he is viewing the scene from behind. At the level of Gaila's shoulder blades, her uniform is pushed out by bony fingers that point and claw beneath the fabric. The fibres of the cloth tear, and a teal cape of feathers falls from her back, the barbs telescoping down until their nacreous tips brush the deck.

Between these iridescent wings, hanging from a leather harness, lies her quiver of stars.

...

'My wings shall open when your eyes shall close in real slumber from this waking drear;  
your wild unrest is my enforced repose; ere I move hence you must not know me here.'  
Could not your wings fan slumber through my brain, soothing away its weariness and pain?  
'Your sleep must stir my wings: sleep, and I bear you gently...'

"Insomnia," James Thomson (1834-1882)

* * *

**13. Uhura: Adenium**

Repeated examinations of Kyle's notebook are fruitless. Weeks of disturbed nights have veiled her brain, but before she sets down the book, she thumbs the pages so they emit a soft burr. She repeats the action, then again, and again, stands, goes to the desk and picks up a pencil. Since the Vulcan's rule, old-fashioned drawing is in fashion, or at least the materials are. Distrusting of technology, they pass school-yard paper notes, and burn after reading.

Down the outer margin of some right hand leaves is a series of handwritten symbols that stretch from top to bottom. With her pencil she traces them, vertically, as they are presented. For most of the night she stares at her unfinished glyphs, but however she completes them, the sounds they show make no sense. In the wee hours she falls asleep, dreaming of their sine curves.

In the morning, she gropes in the bed cover for last night's discarded work, then re-draws the shapes with frantic speed, superimposing the first symbol onto the second, the third onto the fourth, and so on. When she is done, there are seven recognisable characters. The symbols were not unfinished, only separated into their individual strokes. The script is _Katakana,_ an ancient Japanese syllabic alphabet. It has no 'V' sound, so the initial letter of one word is sounded as a 'B'. Even with this substitution, she sees the meaning of the syllables immediately.

"To-ze-ka-ra Bu-ka-na"

_Toxicara Vulcana._

She lifts the notebook from the night-table night table, and props it up to display the rose, luminous in its paper frame.

...

She was skilled in music and the dance  
And the old arts of love  
At the court of the poisoned rose  
And the perfumed glove

"Alas, poor queen," Marion Angus (1865-1946)

* * *

**14. Chapel: I lay in dust life's glory**

This laying out of my equipment forges an ancestral link. Did some long-dead chemist in New Orleans set out her work this way? These workings haven't changed in centuries. The penultimate step in my preparations is to remove a heavy rock-crystal stopper from an inverted-teardrop flask, and lay it on the bench, beside the midnight rose. Then, I hang the flask from a bright metal frame.

Masked, I pound the plant to powder, each blow a poisonous release, and pour the dust into the blown glass vessel. It already holds potassium hydroxide, and solvent to draw out the venom.

My mortar and pestle are made from snowflake obsidian. Carved and polished, they are a soft gratification to the hand. While I sterilise them, I wonder who made these tools; who took this volcanic lump and shaped it? The imprint of their life echoes in this ancient utensil. Within its black mass lie refractive chrysanthemum-bursts of spherulite, little fireworks against a dark background.

Under the microscope, these pale silica bodies show a cross at their centre.

Nobody is here; these are basic labs in the bowels of the ship, so I rest and watch the gentle process take place inside the separation funnel. My fingers press against my breastbone, tracing the blunt arms of my silver charm hanging there.

In the resulting layered cocktail of blue, green and clear supernatant, I see a sunrise.

...

O Joy that seekest me through pain, I cannot close my heart to thee;  
I trace the rainbow through the rain, and feel the promise is not vain,  
That morn shall tearless be.

O Cross that liftest up my head, I dare not ask to fly from thee;  
I lay in dust life's glory dead, and from the ground there blossoms red  
Life that shall endless be.

"O Love That Will Not Let Me Go," George Matheson (1842-1906)

* * *

**15. Scotty: Fearsome engine**

Steam, the fuel of the external combustion engine. Scotsmen were to the fore during its invention: Watt, Stevenson, Nasmyth. In his quarters sits a model of _Stevenson's Rocket_, enamelled in a yellow that looks cheerful or bilious according to his mood. He strokes its polished chimney and pushes the pistons that drive the wheels that carry invisible, miniature passengers on their journey. Like fledgling space exploration, steam power begat death. On the _Rocket's_ maiden voyage she hit and killed a prominent politician who, by accident and terrible luck, was put in her path.

_Accident, and terrible luck._

In fantasies, he heaves open the doors to the _Enterprise _engine room and finds himself in an infernal cacophony of pumping, oiled brass. Men are boiler suited and shiny, wearing flat caps and hob-nailed boots, with greasy rags tucked in their belts.

In the real engine room it is too quiet, and a noose of silence drops about him, until he feels its knot at his seventh vertebra.

Weary, he sits and wipes an imaginary streak of coal from his forehead.

Chapel gave him a task: hyposprays are too bulky to conceal so something smaller is required, and his inspiration came from the piston, the driving, thumping heart of the ancient engine. Between thumb and forefinger he rolls the tiny device; its hollow chambers hold only four microliters, but that will be enough.

Aye, we are all deaf from the noise, and dumb from the shouting.

...

Engine of Watt, unrivalled is thy sway.  
Compared with thine, what is the tyrant's power?  
His might destroys, while thine creates and saves.  
Thy triumphs live and grow, like fruit and flower;  
But his are writ in blood, and read on graves.

"The Steam Engine," Ebenezer Elliott (1781-1849)

* * *

Next; McCoy, T'Pring, Scotty and Chapel


	4. Parts 16 to 19 - End

**16. McCoy: This is the man all tattered and torn**

They were named on the passenger manifest, from Cork to New York, 1851. Margaret and John McCoy and their six children; William, Henry, Maurice, Robert, Margaret and Alice. Margaret senior was thirty-six years old, her eldest William, nineteen and her youngest, little Robert, only four. Six children in fifteen years, the gaps in their ages suggest to him deaths in between.

Out of two hundred and seventy-one passengers, two names are marked with crosses to indicate they died at sea. Disease was common – and malnutrition – since these people had already survived six years of the Great Famine, _an Gorta Mor. _The ship in which they sailed to America was named the _Mississippi _and he likes to think it was a good ship, clean and not overcrowded, as proven by the low number of fatalities.

But the deaths: poor Ellen Reilly and Mary Doherty, only nineteen and twenty years of age. Maybe they were lovers, fearful of separation once they reached the shore. Did they jump ship and drown together, their heavy woollen skirts dragging them down to the bottom, skin turned white as bones and hair loosed and floating among the kelp forest?

He has memorised all this and more; his ancestors' rise from smallholders starved from their homeland, to respected members of the medical profession on another continent. Their sacrifice will be honoured; _we will break the surface._

With what ease he has drifted from healer to accomplice; aiding an act he cannot condone, yet knowing with each passing watch the options, and allies, diminish. Beside him his love lies awake. Beneath the vellum of her wrist sits a poisoned dart, placed there by his own equipment. She need only utter one command to release it.

Of course, its malfunction will kill her.

And he will live on, in tatters.

...

This is the rat that ate the malt  
This is the cat that killed the rat  
This is the dog that worried the cat  
This is the maiden all forlorn  
This is the man all tattered and torn  
This is the priest all shaven and shorn  
This is the cock that crowed in the morn.

"The House that Jack Built," English traditional, (c1755)

* * *

**17. T'Pring: Through a glass darkly**

This life has flung her farther from Surak's teachings than she has ever been. On Vulcan, Stonn – the boy next door – called her _my passionate friend_. Indeed she was, from childhood, a singular Vulcan.

If she leaves this task to another, she is a coward. Spock was promised to her from the age of seven and what was begun then, she will end. Her family thought his will to be the ultimate Vulcan would temper their feral daughter. Sarek was incredulous a full-born would accept his inconvenient hybrid.

Now, where there was spirit, there is rage; where there was fire, there are white-hot embers; and where there was admiration, there is sorrow.

She followed him to Starfleet where in space, he met James T. Kirk and broke their betrothal of eighteen years, and T'Pring came to know she did not want a man who did not want her. Then she met an angry Terran doctor, and knew everything she felt before was romantic fancy from an immature mind. _Leonard, if you cannot love me after this, forgive me my pain._

Tonight she must summon her fury, to ensure this final encounter with the captain replicates their rare wrestling matches. Yet, all she wants is to be tender, to take his face in her hands, kiss him – they never kiss – and soothe his skin. She makes do with a covert press of her hand to his heart and a ghosting of her long fingers over his, feeling the joints, the first wider than the second. Her eyes track his features, his limbs, even the tendons in his feet, trying to memorise his contours.

This last time, she needs to take him in, to catalogue him. Nobody else can commit to memory his essence in clear and ringing tones. Whatever he is, or was, he is someone, and they once were something.

With her body, she wills her beautiful boy to return, and if he does, she can be Charity.

But he does not.

He has her up against a bulkhead, her bare back cold on the painted surface, her legs wrapped around his waist and her forearms resting on his shoulders. Against her clavicle, his forehead presses hard as though asking for absolution. If she could, she would offer it. In all ways she absorbs him, until she senses the beginning of osmosis, a permeation of her thoughts, the barrier stretched too thin to prevent bleeding, and she must shout their salvation.

"_Pukeshta va'ashiv svi' thrap-fam'es nufau!"_

At the first two words she feels the sting of the small dart tearing from her wrist. From over his shoulder, she watches the micro- missile fire into his spine, a tiny rapier embedded into the surface of his upper thoracic region. She digs her nails into his neck, trying to cause pain in various areas, to confuse his senses. It spurs him on and for a few seconds she fears he will damage her, but he soon falters, and taking her with him, folds to the ground before crashing onto his back so the deck shudders.

Softer now; _Pukeshta va'ashiv svi' thrap-fam'es nufau.__  
_

She strokes his chest, blooding it with a narrow green trail from her exit wound, and heavy tears splash among the dark hairs.

_We were warriors, were we not? Do you remember Vulcan, Spock? Where the red wind tore our skin, and the sun soared so high it cast no shadows for shelter? Where we ran through the scouring heat, fighting and rolling in the dust._

_We spoke as children, understood as children and thought as children, until we were grown, and put away childish things. Do you remember the caves? Where we clung together in our cool refuge, still fighting and rolling breathless in the dust._

_Now I see through a glass darkly._

Her hand moves down and she fixes his temperature in her mind to three decimal places; he is much warmer than her beautiful doctor. Long nails rake his stomach, but the muscles cannot even twitch in response.

_Come in under the shadow of this red rock, and I will show you something different from either your shadow at morning striding behind you, or your shadow at evening rising to meet you._

Now her nose touches his ear and she sweeps her tongue over the point in one last taste of his constituent elements.

_I will show you fear in a handful of dust._

_...  
_

If you cannot love me, beloved, forgive me my pain.  
Do not look askance at me from afar.  
I will steal back to my corner and sit in the dark.  
With both hands I will cover my naked shame.  
Turn your face from me, beloved, and forgive me my pain.

If you love me, beloved, forgive me my joy.  
When my heart is borne away by the flood of happiness,  
do not smile at my perilous abandonment.  
When I sit on my throne and rule you with my tyranny of love,  
when like a goddess I grant you my favour,  
bear with my pride, beloved, and forgive me my joy.

"Forgive Me My Love," Rabindranath Tagore (1861 – 1941)

...

1. Vulcan – Re-born through forgiveness. Thank you to Vulcan Language Dictionary.  
2. Now I see through a glass darkly – 1 Corinthians, 13:11  
3. Come in under the shadow of this red rock.. I will show you fear in a handful of dust – The Wasteland, T.S. Eliot, 1922. Quoted under fair use in UK, in public domain USA.

* * *

**18. Scotty: Home is the sailor, home from the sea**

The old girl's quieter now, I reckon even her engines purr that wee bit lower. Aye, what a change is in the ship, and in her crew. One of my first jobs under Captain T'Pring was to gather up all the agonizers and put them in the disintegrator. If I was chief o' a Victorian engine room, I'd have thrown them in the furnace, it's no' so dramatic is it, putting them in the disintegrator?

Looks like we're a kind of pirate ship now, not just us though, there's other ships like ours. Our wee battles and skirmishes will soon enough become a war. He broke a lot of us, but Uhura's the worst pain to my heart. She's got the posture of a dancer and the dignity of her clan all right, but if you really know her, you can see she's been hollowed out. I'd pay real money to hear her singing again. I miss my pal Kyle too, we had a good laugh together. Man alive, you need that here, don't you?

* * *

A few months back it started happening, folks re-appearing. The first time was that wee ensign, you know, yon blonde boy, Lindstrom. He just appeared in a passageway, right where he evaporated. The first person to see him damn near fainted in shock, while he's saying _what's wrong_, like nothing happened. Turns out those dozen crew members didn't disappear to Brigadoon or somewhere, they were pushed forward in time six months, anchored to their location. I knew exactly where I'd been with Kyle when he vanished, so all we had to do was wait; I'd got it calculated down to the second.

I've never seen anything like it, Uhura standing there, her jaw set against tears and her hand petting that snake thing she wears, mouthing some prayer. She's got so thin, like a wee lassie. I felt right sick, what if he didn't come back? I think I'd have put myself out of an airlock for her if it didn't work, it was that bad.

And then there he is, marching along in his black leather boots, ginger curls flopping over his forehead, like he's striding off the deck of a frigate. Poor man didn't understand why his wife's greeting him like she thought he was dead. If I could have bottled the look on her face, I'd be a rich man.

Kyle was the last. We've no more missing now, only them that can never come back.

_Commander Scott stands, puts his hand in the frost of the stasis-chamber before him, and brushes some clear to reveal the occupant's face._

Will you listen to me Chekov, sniffing away? I must be getting a chill or something. I miss our chess matches, son. My imagination's running away with me an' all. Looks like you've got a better colour.

...

'Tis evening on the moorland free,  
The starlit wave is still:  
Home is the sailor from the sea,  
The hunter from the hill.

"Home is the Sailor from the Sea," A.E. Housman (1859-1936)

* * *

**19. Chapel: Whence cometh such tender rapture  
**

The thin and brittle butterflies of secrets fly away, but chaos does not follow in their drift.

Spirits inhabit the stasis area. McCoy thinks I'm a trauma victim, trying to make sense of horror by resorting to primitive beliefs, and calls it hogwash. Scotty believes me, and talks to the bodies. _The hearing is last to go_, he says. I don't tell him the inhabitants of these caskets don't hear anything.

After many months, the bodies are still here, but the doctor and I are still undecided about their fate. Should we disintegrate them, or keep them as donors? For years we were told not to think for ourselves and now we've forgotten how.

Alone with my Padd, I complete the daily checks only a few of us wish to perform. Most staff describe the area as creepy and avoid watches here as much as possible. Despite readouts to the contrary, the area's temperature feels lower by several degrees. I use my hand to wipe quiet, hot tears and feel them frozen on my face, although the ambient temperature is not low enough to cause this.

My head raises and I'm caught by a new thing among the pods, a tiny blinking light beneath the condensation on Chekov's bio-readout. I stammer out a query to the computer, water pooling at the back of my throat, and she answers;

_This life-form is capable of full independent existence._

I drop my Padd to the deck and jab at icons on the info-screen to open his pod.

After so many months his curls are long, a trail of tears is frozen on his cheek and his pupils are dilated so I say; _we have a new captain now, we're all free, you helped free us, Pavel. _His eyes close and I admire their long lashes; a boy's lashes. I take his hand and see how dark his lips are against cold, bloodless skin. Stuck together with frost, his eyelids hesitate to part again and when they do, I press my lips to his forehead and offer him some water. Gentle pressure grips my fingers, and he smiles a tiny smile.

It is not my honour to lift Chekov from this frozen womb and help him take new, shaky steps for the second time in his short life.

I page Sulu's quarters, relieved he is not on the bridge, and demand his presence.

...

Whence cometh such tender rapture?  
Those curls – they are not the first ones  
I've smoothed, and I've already  
Known lips that were darker than yours.  
The stars have risen and faded,

Such songs in the depths of darkness,  
– Whence cometh such tender rapture? –  
And what's done with it, artful  
Young vagabond, passing minstrel  
With lashes too long to say.

"Whence Cometh Such Tender Rapture?" Marina Tsvetaeva (1892 – 1941)

–– END ––


End file.
